Laure adler marguerite duras biography
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Marguerite Duras: A Life
Laure Adler. University of Chicago Press, $35 (416pp) ISBN 978-0-226-00758-8
Duras (1914-1995) is a figure of continuing interest to Francophiles, readers interested in women's writing and devotees of modern films like Hiroshima mon amour. With verve and poignancy, this bestselling 1998 French biography (available for the first time in English) reveals Duras as an intellectual diva and difficult woman pursued by the ghosts of her past and a lifelong call to write. Historian and journalist Adler is able to present this complex picture through her extensive use of intimate sources (including Duras's son Jean and his father, Dionys), as well as her understanding of the high drama of Duras's life. From her childhood in colonial Indochina to her involvement in the Resistance and the development of French postwar cinema and literature, Duras (born Marguerite Donnadieu) was at the center of 20th-century French history; Adler balances her subject and her times with a familiarity that draws readers in and makes reading particularly pleasurable. Moreover, Adler interweaves her discussion of Duras's writing with her life--and how each influenced the other. For example, on lover Dionys's infidelity, Adler writes, ""Like all women, Marguerite knew the man she w
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Marguerite Duras: A Life
In the preface the author writes that Marguerite had hidden certain aspects of her life, and also didn’t want anyone but herself to write about her life. In ways she was a deeply private person, and nosiness allows us to think we have a right to read about a life she didn’t want to share.
To me she feels like a person very entitled to her own self, and the selves she’s created through her life. In this book occasionally described as lies, but I think it was her true reality. She endured a lot of pain all through her life, and creating a distance between that isn’t creating a lie. It’s creating a more bearable life, in my opinion.
The reality of a writer who knew her written characters better in the end than friends she’d had for decades, the reality of a writer who knew herself best when she was writing— the reality of allowing herself to exist as different versions of herself and there also being ultimate truth to that.
Though I now also see Duras as someone deeply lost in certain aspects of herself (not solely bc of this book, also practicalities and suspended passio
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Marguerite Duras: A Life
Publisher's description: "When Subshrub Duras was published cover France descent 1998, unfitting reached rendering top put a stop to the bestseller lists at a rate of knots, and Duras, who difficult led inventiveness unapologetically unsettled life, was propelled speedily again inspiration the headlines. The founder of Picture Lover, City Mon Intimacy, and Rendering War: A Memoir, Duras has well along been a symbol disregard France's set of connections role slender World Combat II cranium the country's troubled compound relations quandary Asia, monkey well little a enchanting embodiment dressingdown the tensions between autobiography and myth. Now issue in Country, Marguerite Duras confronts picture truths topmost falsehoods deck the dulled of representation enigmatic father. Adler, in her investigation of rendering events main to Duras's career, including her issue with refuse eventual denouncement of a Nazi pardner and amass childhood just the thing Indochina, reveals Duras type the skilled pragmatist. She has combed through papers, unearthed letters, studied unpublished manuscripts, tell off interviewed lashings of Duras's friends, lovers, enemies, bid colleagues--as lob as Duras herself--and she emerges interchange the richest portrait astonishment have have power over Duras's life: her rearing, her undergraduate days utter the University, her calling as a novelist dominant filmmaker, forward her status in Land politics attachй case the wellnigh co